Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective • Hacker News Board

Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective

#41

Post by clojurerocks » Mon, Apr 04, 2011, 8:43 PM UTC

jcnnghm wrote: post #30

I had a similar experience. I built a iPhone app using the Titanium platform, and decided against releasing it in favor of rebuilding it in Objective-C. I was able to work around the lack of correct documentation, platform inconsistencies, and software bugs for the most part, and was able to get the software to run consistently and reliably on my iPhone 4, but it would randomly crash on iPhone 3's, and iPod touches.…

This was my experience as well actually. I looked at phonegap appcelarator and rhomobile for a while but it seemed that there was such a steep learning curve that you could just build things in the native platforms and have full access to the everything rather then having quasi access via webkit.

All three really were a letdown frankly. Right now im learning Jquery Mobile which oddly enough is kind of cool. Its got a decent community behind it. ANd its jquery so its somewhat more generic.

Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective

#42

Post by phatbyte » Mon, Apr 04, 2011, 8:57 PM UTC

The current mobile dev scene is this:

- Android is Java, iOS is Objc + (cocoa nightmare), Windows Mobile is silverlight (If i'm not wrong)

- iOS (cocoa) is a pain to learn and develop something useful out of it, plus you have to pay dev licenses to apple anually,etc..

- Android store doesn't have the projection Apple store has.

- Native wrappers (titanium, phonegap,etc..) are buggy, lack user support, poor documentation, limited.

So, choose your poison.

What's the solution ? It's freaking insane if you want to have an app for every mobile OS out there at the moment, you need to have at least 2 different teams maintaing code. It's just stupid.

Wrappers are not the way to go fore sure, I think vendors should start considering using standard tools like Javascript, or more easy languages like ruby,python, at least for creating more simple tools, that don't require heavy graphic engine and stuff.

At least this would help companies reduce their efforts on having teams different for each OS.

Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective

#43

Post by phatbyte » Mon, Apr 04, 2011, 9:01 PM UTC

hopeless wrote: post #3

I had a similar experience with the platform. I was very excited, browsed through the APIs to check the required features were there and jumped in. It then took ages to get the right versions of SDKs/XCode and Titanium installed, which also involved searching though forum posts and patching files. Finally I got the "Kitchen Sink" app working. All was good. I started implementing my app and quickly became flummoxed by…

Last time I checked phonegap didn't work with Xcode4, at least not out of the box. You had to hack some scripts to create a project file and stuff.

Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective

#44

Post by pdenya » Mon, Apr 04, 2011, 9:11 PM UTC

Wow, thanks for this write up, I had been considering trying titanium after an unpleasant experience with phonegap.

I went with phonegap for a project and hammered out my application quickly but then spent hours trying to optimize enough that it would run at a reasonable speed. I ended up re-writing as a native app but at least now I know.

Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective

#45

Post by fijter » Mon, Apr 04, 2011, 9:15 PM UTC

I created a iOS app in Titanium Mobile as well, and agree on your points. In addition:

- Multi platform support is very bad. A lot of functionality is working in a different way or not at all in Android and you'll have to find out most of this by trying.

- Stuff breaks with new versions of Appcelerator

- Due to the lack of feedback in the compilation process debugging some problems will take hours

- Creating a complex state-based navigation other then just a basic navigation controller is quite hard and bug-prone, a lot of it has to do with the sometimes very eager garbage collection (completely overlay a item with another, remove the overlay and the underlying element is gone, because it has been collected).

On the other side though:

- Development is a lot quicker (allthough you will lose time fixing stupid bugs).

- App works just like a native app and is quite fast

- A lot is possible, including custom fonts (using them in 3.1 causes a crash, so iOS 4 only, not documented though and caused crashes in the app on iOS3, so be careful, took me a while before I found this), the kitchen sink is a better resource as the docs.

For my next mobile app I think i'll use PhoneGap, since HTML is more portable. While I developed this app I had the constant fear that I would come across a bug that would stop me from finishing the product. It's a risky thing to work with, but you can get some great stuff out of it in no-time if you're lucky.

Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective

#46

Post by protomyth » Mon, Apr 04, 2011, 9:44 PM UTC

phatbyte wrote: post #42

The current mobile dev scene is this: - Android is Java, iOS is Objc + (cocoa nightmare), Windows Mobile is silverlight (If i'm not wrong) - iOS (cocoa) is a pain to learn and develop something useful out of it, plus you have to pay dev licenses to apple anually,etc.. - Android store doesn't have the projection Apple store has. - Native wrappers (titanium, phonegap,etc..) are buggy, lack user support, poor documentat…

You have to pay Microsoft too. What exactly do you find that makes cocoa a "pain to learn"?

Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective

#47

Post by rufugee » Mon, Apr 04, 2011, 10:12 PM UTC

skue wrote: post #39

So glad to see more people pointing this out. Titanium sounds like a great idea and they market it well, but when you look closer you quickly discover that it just fails to deliver. Sadly they seem too focused on spending VC cash on adding bells in whistles when their core functionality still doesn't work. Here are a few examples. Running their sample app. This is the first thing every developer does, so you'd think…

Agreed. Seems like they are wasting away what once had great potential. All my bug reports (3 over the past two years) still stand unanswered and unacknowledged.

The API is broken in many ways. Documented features just refuse to work, and forum and bug posts go unanswered. I assume that paying customers have a better experience, but if they could be a little more responsive and helpful to prospective customers like me, I'm willing to bet they'd have a lot more paying customers.

Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective

#48

Post by wahnfrieden » Mon, Apr 04, 2011, 10:22 PM UTC

AdamMeghji wrote: post #40

I've been using Titanium for 2 months now while developing a prototype version of our iPhone application (Android later), and while I share the author's sentiments on a number of issues, I'm fairly pleased with the results so far. I'm not an Objective-C guy in the least, but am reasonably good with JS, so it's a great way to go native. That said, some comments: - JS Warnings. It's true that one-line ifs, property exi…

> Bugs in XHR with Content-Type and passing Arrays, requiring workarounds when integrating with Rails. Arrays get sent as "( key1: value1\n key2: value2\n)\n"

Can you elaborate on this? What is the Content-Type bug? What do you mean by "passing Arrays" -- how are you serializing?

Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective

#49

Post by phatbyte » Mon, Apr 04, 2011, 10:28 PM UTC

protomyth wrote: post #46

phatbyte wrote: post #42

The current mobile dev scene is this: - Android is Java, iOS is Objc + (cocoa nightmare), Windows Mobile is silverlight (If i'm not wrong) - iOS (cocoa) is a pain to learn and develop something useful out of it, plus you have to pay dev licenses to apple anually,etc.. - Android store doesn't have the projection Apple store has. - Native wrappers (titanium, phonegap,etc..) are buggy, lack user support, poor documentat…

You have to pay Microsoft too. What exactly do you find that makes cocoa a "pain to learn"?

The concept of Outlet was very strange to understand at first, I never knew what should I connect to what (iboutlet, ibactions), then, the cocoa classes methods are big and enigmatic sometimes. I also found that creating a simple tableview with simple content is frustrating, because you have to link so many different steps, you have to create an object for table view, create delegated functions for counting and adding items, create a mutablearray, link it to the tableview, reload it everytime you need to display...and I'm not talking about adding images and stuff.

I'm pretty noob at cocoa, but it's a very hard learning curve because Objc and cocoa have so many specific standards that are strange if you came from other languages.

Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective

#50

Post by jamroom » Mon, Apr 04, 2011, 11:28 PM UTC

andymoe wrote: post #12

We used it to make a simple android app in the last month. It worked and I sure liked writing the app in JavaScript vs Java but we ran into huge issues with Titanium caching resources during the build process that were supposed have be removed or updated and leaving things behind that we then had to track down and manually remove. It basically just takes whatever is in the build directory and tries to package it with…

You need to clean your build directory whenever you change resources (i.e. add new images, delete old images). It makes the build take a bit longer but you'll have no issues. So i.e. just delete the contents of the Resources/build/iphone directory and then rebuild the app from Titanium.